


Lock the Door and Hide (There Are Monsters Inside)

by Silent-Wordsmith (Shatteredsand)



Series: Inhuman [2]
Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: Cheating, F/F, F/M, M/M, Pseudo-Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-11
Updated: 2015-02-11
Packaged: 2018-03-11 21:37:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3333752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shatteredsand/pseuds/Silent-Wordsmith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The realization hits Laura low in the gut, knocking all the air from her lungs. Her heartbeat starts thundering in her ears, impossibly loud but still not loud enough to drawn out the sounds coming out of the dorm.</p>
<p>Then Kirsch is back, his hand on her shoulder, the look in his eyes a painful reflection of her own. “C’mon.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lock the Door and Hide (There Are Monsters Inside)

**Author's Note:**

> A further collaboration between my Beautiful Bastard and I.

 

**Lock the Doors and Hide  
(There Are Monsters Inside)**

Laura does not approve of this. Anything Will needs to say to Carmilla, he can say in front of her, too. This whole thing only works if they’re a team. And maybe Will isn’t a team player—”maybe”, who is she kidding; Will’s only ever on his own side—but this is important. He’d said he’d help them, and Kirsch had vouched for him, and if he’s playing on their team then he needs to play by their rules.

Laura’s staunch disapproval is rendered completely pointless by Kirsch’s bulk blocking the door. She could move him, probably, if she was willing to hurt him. But he is her friend, and the first rule of martial arts is that it’s supposed to be for _defense_. It’s not something that she should just bust out with every time she doesn’t get her way.

She is trying to glare her way through Kirsch’s thick head when the shouting starts. She isn’t particularly surprised, because Laura doesn’t think Carmilla and Will have ever been in the same room for longer than a single breath without one or both of them losing their tempers. Usually violently.

Kirsch doesn’t seem to be getting the message that Laura isn’t pleased with this turn of events—and that’ll teach her to do something like actually attend her classes. This whole mess could have been avoided if she’d had the same willingness as her co-conspirators to completely disregard her GPA.

When the shattering sound of breaking glass breaches the door, however, Laura has had enough of playing the waiting game. Will and Carmilla sussing out some secret vampire nonsense, fine. She’ll deal. She won’t be happy about it, but she’ll deal. But that’s not the sound of heated debate or even vicious argument. That’s _violence_ happening in there, and Laura is so not about to let that stand.

Kirsch doesn’t look happy about it either, but he’s still standing resolute in front of the door. Finally, the impressive level of glare Laura is directing his way begins to have an effect because he starts talking. It’s not moving, which would be preferable, but it’s a start.

“Look, little hottie,” He starts, temporarily cut off by the loud banging coming from the other side of the door. “We just gotta let ‘em do their thing.”

“Let them do ‘their thing’?” Laura is beyond incredulous. “They’re _fighting_ , Kirsch.”

There’s a fragile moment of silent stillness, as if to prove her wrong, and then the slamming starts up again, even louder and more frightening in its intensity.

“It sounds like they’re trying to kill each other!” Laura has had enough. Defense of another means that she’s not breaking her instructor’s first rule. Defense of her girlfriend means that she’s not going to feel too bad about using her skills against her friend. If Carmilla needs her—and three hundred year old vampire or not, Carmilla still needs defending sometimes; usually when she’s claiming she needs it least—then Laura isn’t about to let Kirsch stand in her way.

Kirsch is bound and determined to try, however, his jaw set and his eyes oddly hard. “You don’t wanna go in there, Laura.”

This is, Laura is pretty sure, the first time he’s ever called her by her given name rather than some sort of hottie derivative. Under any other circumstances, she thinks it might have worked, might have been enough to sway her into, at least temporarily, giving in to him. But the circumstances are what they are, and no matter Kirsch’s earnest pleading, Laura isn’t just going to wait outside while his boyfriend and her girlfriend try to _murder each other_.

Kirsch is surprisingly fast for a person of his bulky stature, unexpected speed in those big, gorilla arms. He catches the throat punch Laura had been hoping to use to get him out of the way, then pulls. Laura is strong, but she’s small, and physics dictate that where the greater force pulls, Laura goes. She crashes into his chest as his arms loop around her. The hold is firm and strong, but gentle. Careful. He wants to contain her, not hurt her.

Laura does not appreciate this. At all. She doesn’t need to be contained. She doesn’t need Kirsch to _save_ her from whatever is happening her room. She needs him to let her go, get out of her way, and let her stop their vampires. But even with his careful gentleness, there’s no room for Laura to wiggle out of his grasp. No way for her to escape.

“Kirsch! Let me go!” The noises from inside the room have become less loud but no less present. Low grunts, barely audible through the walls.

“We should take a walk.” Kirsch says, voice tight. Laura vehemently disagrees. They should storm in there, in this apparent lull, and pull their feuding lovers apart before someone ends up dead. Or, well, dead-er. A slight change in pitch from the other side of the door, Kirsch’s face twisting. An expression Laura’s never seen on his face, couldn’t even begin to name. “We should take a walk _now_.”

Improbably , Kirsch manages to actually start walking, Laura still trapped to his chest. The concentration required, however, means that his arms loosen their grip around her after only a few steps. With a twist and a shove, she’s free and heading back towards the door to put an end to this mess.

Then she hears it.

And the world falls out from under her.

The moan is painfully familiar to her. Laura knows that voice, that tone, that inflection. She recognizes the sounds as easily as her own name.

Oh. Oh, god.

The realization hits Laura low in the gut, knocking all the air from her lungs. Her heartbeat starts thundering in her ears, impossibly loud but still not loud enough to drown out the sounds coming out of the dorm.

Then Kirsch is back, his hand on her shoulder, the look in his eyes a painful reflection of her own. “C’mon.”

Laura doesn’t want to go, she wants to bust down the door and start screaming. Because how could Carmilla do this to her? After all the struggles they had to go through together, after how hard it was for the both of them to just admit that they wanted this? How could she throw all that away for a night with Will—Will, an untrustworthy, reluctant ally that Carmilla doesn’t even _like_ —as if it had never mattered at all. As if _Laura_ didn’t matter.

Kirsch’s hand moves from her shoulder down to her elbow, pulling softly. She follows his quiet guidance without actively making the decision to. It’s just…easier. Normally Laura is all for the path of most resistance, of fighting it out—re: she’s chosen to date the brooding, mysterious vampire instead of the cute, if slightly overprotective, Lit TA—but it feels too hard. Trying to process what the hell had gone so wrong, the signs she must have missed, all the possible scenarios that could possibly explain away the ache of this moment.

They really were still fighting, it just sounded suspiciously similar to having sex. Or, maybe, fanfic had gotten something right and there’d been a mysterious outbreak of vampiric sex pollen. That was possible, right? If vampires and zombies and mushrooms the size of men are real, then sex pollen can’t be off limits.

The common room is empty, understandable since it’s after dark and everyone knows that people wandering around at night tend to get wherever they were going in a state of injury they hadn’t left in, if they get there at all. Being the target of a vampire cult, ironically, gives Laura a tiny bit of protection there. It can’t save her from rogue Alchemy experiments or the like, but all the supernatural creatures/students know better than to try and eat her. A little human girl is hardly worth risking the wrath of the Dean, after all. There’s still the vampires to worry about, but that’s a topic that her brain is staunchly avoiding because it makes her think about Carmilla. And Will. And Carmilla and Will. Upstairs, right now. Doing _that_.

Kirsch leads Laura over to one of the couches and sits her down. Part of Laura wants to be outraged at being handled—she’s not a child and she doesn’t deserve to be treated like one—but there’s a pained, vacant expression on his face that Laura heavily suspects is mirrored on her own. And this doesn’t feel like Kirsch is trying to coddle her. It feels like Kirsch is just trying to make sure she’s partially taken care of before he has a meltdown of his own.

“Everything’s fine.” He’s mumbling to himself, pacing a long line in front of her, and Laura is a little worried about his mental stability. She’s not entirely sure what the appropriate reaction to your significant other cheating on you with your friend’s significant other is—she’s never even _had_ a girlfriend before Carmilla, and she hadn’t thought she’d need to look that up—but she doesn’t think _fine_ is anywhere near the realm of where they currently are. “Will’s just doing his thing. His stupid, sucky vampire thing.”

“Kirsch…”

Kirsch doesn’t even seem to hear her. “He’ll do his dumbass vampire thing. And then he’ll apologize and _explain_ it, and I’ll yell at him…”

“Kirsch.”

“But we’ll be okay. We’re always okay. Everything’s gonna be okay.” He keeps muttering lowly to himself, and it’s really starting to freak Laura out. Because she’s trying to deal with enough at the moment, what with her first ever girlfriend having sex with someone who emphatically isn’t her, she doesn’t have the headspace to handle Kirsch’s breakdown right now. Maybe it’s selfish—it is, she knows it is—but she just _can’t_ right now.

“Kirsch!”

“Look, it sucks. Of course it sucks. That’s my hottie in there, too, you know.” Kirsch stops pacing for a moment to look Laura in the eyes, then resumes wearing a tread in the common room carpet. “I get that it sucks. Because it does. It sucks like _hella_ hard. But there’s also, you know, stuff. Important stuff. And that’s not them saying that they like each other or anything, because they don’t. My dude really, really has serious problems with your babe. But this is a thing that needs to be happening, maybe, because of reasons. Because Will is hella fucked up and a serious part of that is hella Carmilla’s fault…”

“Because of _reasons_? Seriously?” Laura cannot even begin to list all the ways that’s an inadequate explanation. Somewhere, on some level that has no bearing on this one, Laura knows that Kirsch doesn’t actually _have_ an explanation; this isn’t his fault. “Your boyfriend is _fucking_ my girlfriend and all you can say is ‘because of reasons’?!”

“Look, it sucks—”

“Stop saying ‘sucks’! Stop saying the same stupid word over and over again! This doesn’t suck, Kirsch! This is _beyond_ sucking!” Laura is shouting, and she shouldn’t be. They’re in public, even if they’re alone right now, and this isn’t Kirsch’s fault. Kirsch isn’t the one sleeping with her girlfriend. Kirsch isn’t her lover screwing someone else. But she’s angry, she’s really goddamned angry, and Kirsch is here, where she can yell and scream and shout, and not down the hall betraying every single part of their relationship with a being that neither of them can stand.

“It does fucking suck! It’s _awful_!” Kirsch shouts back, his voice sounding almost wet. “It fucking sucks that your girl fucked my guy up so badly that this is how he deals with it! _It all **fucking** **sucks**_!”

“Don’t you blame Carmilla for this! Carmilla isn’t _making_ Will fuck her!” It’s the weirdest sentence to ever come out of her mouth, but Laura is too angry to care. How dare Kirsch try and foist the burden of this disaster onto Carmilla and Carmilla alone. Carmilla is ancient and so, so broken. Will is a toddler in comparison, throwing a big, evil tantrum every time he feels like he isn’t getting enough attention.

“You really think this is Will’s fault? That my bro would just do me that way? Will’s my dude, and I love him, but he is seriously, seriously twisted and that isn’t his fault!”

“Well, it’s not Carmilla’s either!”

“ _Yes, it **is**_!” Kirsch explodes suddenly, red in the face and eyes narrowed. “He _needed_ her! He needed her and she fucking _abandoned_ him, she _destroyed_ him and she _keeps destroying him_ and he can’t even talk about it. She treats him like shit because she can’t handle the fact that _she fucking broke him in the first place_! If it weren’t for her, he wouldn’t even _be_ at Silas, trying to fix everything!”

Laura’s jaw gapes open, because what the holy hell was _that_? Will isn’t trying to fix everything. Will isn’t trying to _fix_ anything. He’s only playing nice because he likes—loves?—Kirsch.  Carmilla was the one trying to fix things. Even before Laura came into the picture, Carmilla had been trying to fix things—scaring girls off so they’d be safe—what the holy hell had _Will_ been doing to “fix” things in all the years he’s been  the dean’s favorite little minion?

“Fix things? Fix things?! Kirsch, he _killed_ Sarah Jane!” It occurs to Laura that that’s possibly the cruelest thing she’s ever said to another human being right around the same time it’s coming out of her mouth. And then it’s too late to stop it, to take it back. To not have to see the way Kirsch’s face crumples, the way he just…falls apart, a fragile house of cards in a hurricane. Scraps of paper being ripped to shreds by razor wind and shrapnel rain. Laura’s words and her rage and her hurt—this still isn’t his fault; how could she have said that to him?—tearing Kirsch down just as effectively as whatever Will is doing upstairs.

“Fuck you, Hollis.” Laura has never heard Kirsch sound like this. Voice low and dark, gravel in his throat. She’d watched him break down, and then she’d seen him fall apart, and she wonders if this is what Kirsch looks like when he’s trying not to explode. She thinks it is. The muscle in his jaw throbbing violently, shoulders drawn back with trembling tension, hands curled into shaking fists. “Fuck. You.”

Laura has never been afraid of Kirsch. His demeanor has always been too open, too friendly—even when it was _overly_ friendly and his interest in her was as obvious as it was unreciprocated—for her to find him frightening. But this doesn’t look like the overeager puppy of a boy who had bounced into her room with the—chauvinistic and arrogant, but _sweet_ —hope of being her knight in shining armor. This isn’t the less than brilliant peer sitting next to her and asking for help because he can’t wrap his mind around Beowulf. This is a man who has been suffering nearly since the beginning of the term, who had had his girlfriend _die_ , who had to face the revelation that his boyfriend was the enemy, the his current boyfriend had played a not insignificant role in the single-most brutal loss in his life. And Laura had smeared salt in the wounds, and if there was ever a time to be afraid of Kirsch, she thinks this might be it.

But Laura isn’t scared of Kirsch right now.

She’s scared for him.

“Kirsch.” He flinches back when she reaches for him.

“Will has done a lot of fucked up stuff, hurt a lot of people. But Carmilla has, too. You can’t just defend her and her humanity because she loves you enough to change and not do the same for Will. That isn’t fair.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Yes, it fucking is. Don’t be a hippogriff! If we’re forgiving Carmilla for killing hundreds of girls,  we’re forgiving Will for killing dozens. Just because you knew SJ, just because I _loved_ her, doesn’t make it _different_.”

Laura winces. She hadn’t realized that Kirsch had felt so strongly about Sarah, in the brief time they’d been together. Not that she’d really been _herself_ at the time. But still…

He moves away from her hand reaching out to take his.

“Don’t. Just fucking don’t, L.” He says, nearly a snarl, before turning and storming away.

Laura watches as Kirsch gets smaller and smaller, until he’s disappeared down the hall completely, her mouth still hanging open in shocked disbelief.

OooO

Kirsch slows to a crawl the moment he turns the corner, and rests his back against the wall. His entire body is shaking, shivering, and he can’t catch his words even inside his own brain. They’re moving too fast, and they’re sharp as knives. So instead, he slams his fist through a tackboard, leaving a neat, circular hole in the middle of a Silas Glee Club poster.

He wants to scream. He wants to grab a plane ticket, fly away and never look back. He wants - even now - to talk to Will, to beg him to explain what the _fuck_ he’s thinking, why he’s _not_ thinking, why Kirsch has to carve out pieces of himself _yet again_ to keep loving him. He wants to yell at Carmilla for taking advantage of the man he loves, for running her teeth against the seams she left when she sliced him open again and again. He wants to stop forgiving Will for hurting him even though - perhaps this is worse - none of Will’s sins ever have anything to do with _them_ , not really.

It’s always about Carmilla, and their mother, and the scars she left that means the two of them can only know how to love each other when they’re hurting each other. It’s about Will’s brief, fucked up human life when he was young and angry and swore he’d break the world before he’d let _it_ break _him_.

Kirsch has felt Will healing underneath his fingertips, seen the desperation in his eyes as they made love. Heard his voice break at 3am after too many drinks, finally talking about his past, his family. The look in his eyes when Will would swear he’d do anything to keep him safe.

No, this isn’t about them. If only that made Kirsch feel even a little better.

OooO

Laura is sitting back down on the couch when she sees Kirsch come back. His eyes are stormy in a way she’s never associated with him. “Kirsch?”

“I’m still really mad, and I don’t wanna talk anymore, but I just remembered that you are tiny vampire bait. So.” He folds himself into an armchair and pointedly stares somewhere over her shoulder.

Laura knows that Kirsch has a right to that. She’s hurt him terribly. He doesn’t have to be here at all. He could have stormed off all the way back to the Zeta house and been well within his rights. But Kirsch is a good man and a good friend, and he cares enough about her to risk his own life to help protect her.

It stings. The silence. Laura closes her eyes and tries not to let overwhelm her. So many things in her life are overwhelming right now, she doesn’t have time to let it all overtake her. But her roommate is missing, taken as a pawn in some grander scheme, and Danny still isn’t talking to her, can barely look at her, and Carmilla is upstairs sleeping with enemy, and Kirsch is one of her best friends and she’s been so cruel to him and now he isn’t speaking to her either.

It feels so, so overwhelming that Laura can’t even breathe.

It’s her first year of college, her first year away from home and her father’s loving but overbearing protection. It was supposed to be good books and bad parties. Friends. Maybe a romance. It was supposed to be _fun_. She didn’t ask for this, for terror and violence and the weight of Betty’s life, of Natalie’s life, of all the other missing girls’ lives. She didn’t ask for it and she doesn’t want it, but she can’t justify putting it down.

Who will save them, if she doesn’t?

Carmilla had tried, had been trying, but for every girl she convinced to run away, another ended up pod-personed and dead. Maybe Will had been trying too, though Laura doesn’t think so. And however many lives had been spared through that intervention, the Dean’s plans had never been derailed. Not _really_. The number of casualties had never dropped.

If she doesn’t do something, something big, then people are going to die.

And Laura almost doesn’t even _care_ right now because the girl she loves, who she thought had loved her back, is fucking Will in their room right now.

She doesn’t mean to start crying. It’s stupid and pathetic and what right does she have to shed tears over some three hundred year old vampire she’s known for a few months when there’s so much more at stake than whether or not she makes it through this with her heart intact? She doesn’t mean to, because surely there’s something else she could be doing, something actually useful, but she can’t stop the tears from spilling over the edges and streaking down her cheeks.

She doesn’t have the right, and she doesn’t have the time, but she can’t stop.

“Laura…”

Laura shakes her head, bites her lip. She isn’t a child, she can handle this. She can. She just needs a minute, that’s all. Just a minute to feel all the things tearing her up inside and then she can go back to being the eternal optimist, bound and determined that they’re going to win this. Just a minute.

Then Kirsch’s arms are around her again, comforting instead of constricting, and Laura still can’t breathe. He pulls her into his chest, muffles her shaking sob with his chest, lets her tears sink into his shirt.

“We’ll make it through, L. It’s gonna hurt and it’s gonna suck, but we’ll make it through.”

Laura isn’t entirely sure she believes him, but she wants to. She wants this to be something easily explained, swept under the rug. She wants to close her eyes and fall asleep so she can wake up and realize it was all a terrible nightmare.

Pressed against his chest, Laura realizes that Kirsch is shaking. His breathing just as ragged, and she thinks he must be crying too. He doesn’t say anything else, he just keeps her wrapped up in his arms. There’s a comfort in that, in shared agonies. They’re both hurting so much right now, but at least they’re not alone.

It’s the comfort of that, the desolate solace, that finally allows Laura to drift into the blank darkness of unconsciousness. This time, she doesn’t have any nightmares.

When she wakes up, still curled into Kirsch, she doesn’t move. Kirsch is nearly still around her, just the steady motion of his chest rising and falling, and it’s then that Laura has an idea. The idea.

It’s not perfect—or maybe it is, Laura isn’t sure she trusts herself enough to be any judge of that right now—but it’s an idea. It’s a plan. And…it makes what happened last night feel almost bearable.

Kirsch had said that this was Will and Carmilla doing a “stupid vampire thing”, that Will and Carmilla “had problems”. The implication being that this was them trying, in a truly unhealthy and incredibly painful way, to deal with them. And if that’s true, then it wasn’t Carmilla cheating on her last night, not really. It had been Carmilla—beautiful, damaged Carmilla—trying fix something broken between her and Will.

It means, Laura chokes at the thought before forcing herself to keep going, that it will probably happen again. That is just another aspect of her girlfriend’s vampiric nature and centuries of abuse. That it isn’t Carmilla’s fault, and it’s not Will’s either. It just _is_.

It means….it means that maybe, if they go about it the right way, the relationship between Carmilla and Will can be salvaged into something worth saving. That they can all recover from this.

It means Kirsch was right. They’re going to make it through this. The four of them. Together.


End file.
